The Government will not transfer “neither a euro nor a piece of land” for housing to the communities if they do not guarantee its “public perpetuity”

The Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, has assured that the Executive will not transfer to the autonomous communities “neither a euro nor a piece of State land for housing in which public perpetuity is not guaranteed.” In an interview published this Monday in La Vanguardia, Rodríguez highlighted that the Government will condition “all these efforts to protect the public park.” “The circumstance will not arise in which State land can be used or transferred to other public administrations that have not accepted that it must be maintained permanently and perpetually,” he insisted.

Rodríguez already demanded that the autonomous communities protect the public housing stock “in perpetuity” during his appearance in Congress last week. It is an idea that has been insisting on for several months but for which, in practice, the central Executive has no direct jurisdiction. In fact, as the minister recalled this Monday, “the Government has already tried it through the Housing Law, certainly qualified by the Constitutional Court.”

This nuance refers to the ruling that indicated that the article of the state regulation that sought to extend the protection time for protected housing invaded regional powers. According to experts on the subject consulted by elDiario.es, the key for the Executive is to negotiate on a case-by-case basis the conditions of the transfers of funds or the transfer of land to communities or town councils. “I hope we reach all of this by agreement,” Rodríguez confided.

The lever that the Ministry of Housing relies on is the State Housing Plan, which must come into force in 2026 and on which it is already working. “It is a new instrument to address this policy. Not so much in a design of à la carte programs, but in setting objectives,” Rodríguez pointed out in La Vanguardia.

In the meeting that the ministry held with the ministries, within the framework of the Sectoral Conference at the beginning of October, Rodríguez already stated that the Housing Law allowed the Government to apply “extraordinary” measures in stressed areas, where rents are more skyrocketing. . Sources from his department explained that the Executive would take into account that the communities activated all the resources of the norm for the distribution of these funds through the State Plan. Now, the Executive also conditions these resources to be protected in perpetuity.

According to Housing data, around 70% of the money budgeted by the communities for housing between 2021 and 2024 was transferred from the central government.

In recent weeks, the Ministry has been proud of Operation Camp, the urban project that will allow the construction of 10,700 homes in Madrid. They will be built on land that the Ministry itself purchased from Defense and on which they have guaranteed that the properties will have affordable prices forever, even those that are sold to individuals. What has not yet been indicated is the mechanism that will be activated for this.

“We already know what has not worked and that is the confiscation, the free sale of public housing to individuals and even to vulture funds; resources that should serve the general interest. If they had not been sold to the free market, we would now have 2.5 million public homes in Spain. The formula has to be the opposite and that is what the Government is proposing: to guarantee with these public resources that housing always serves a general interest, that it is the answer to a fundamental right,” Rodríguez explained in an interview with elDiario.es. in September.

The minister insisted on this idea last Wednesday in Congress, where she stated that the construction of social housing in the past had meant a “social lift for millions of people.” However, he also pointed out that the other side of that coin is that the “disqualification of the protection of those homes means that today we cannot count on that park with those resources that were paid for by everyone.” “It is important to take this into account when deploying public policies. It is necessary to protect the housing stock, public lands and the efforts we are making so that they serve the general interest forever,” he stated.